Okay, I'll admit that I didn't watch Jenna and NotJenna (and I want to point out that I coined that nom d'snark back in the day when I couldn't remember Barbara's name) but from what I've read...it wasn't pretty.

You know, when the Germans brought down the Berlin Wall, America's determination helped wield the sledgehammers. When that lone, young Chinese man stood in front of those tanks in Tiananmen Square, America's hopes stood with him. And when Nelson Mandela smiled in election victory after all those years in prison, America celebrated, too.

When Rep. Dick Cheney voted against a 1986 resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela and recognition of the African National Congress, Americans did know this man had been waiting decades for his freedom. In a larger sense, so had all black South Africans. The tenets of American democracy -- one man, one vote -- were denied to the majority of citizens, along with the most basic economic and educational needs.

Yet Republican vice presidential candidate Cheney still defends his vote, saying on ABC's ``This Week'' that ``the ANC was then viewed as a terrorist organization. . . . I don't have any problems at all with the vote I cast 20 years ago.'' What, then, does this tell us about what information Cheney considers before he takes a decision? And what the long-term consequences are likely to be, and on whom?

By no means were Mandela or the ANC universally viewed as ``terrorists,'' evidenced by the fact that the vote on the resolution was 245-177 in favor, but still shy of the two-thirds needed to override President Ronald Reagan's veto.

Omigaw, one of the riff-raff (that being people who don't see eye-to-eye with the administration) actually had the audacity to try say and say a discouraging word to Vice President #@&%!*#& Yourself:

Man Held for Coming Within Feet of Cheney

A 21-year-old Yale student, posing as a volunteer at the Republican National Convention, got within 10 feet of Vice President Dick Cheney and shouted anti-war statements before being dragged away, authorities said Tuesday.

Secret Service Agent Shannon Zeigler said Cheney "was never in any harm or danger" during the incident Monday night in Madison Square Garden. The suspect, Thomas Frampton, was charged with assaulting federal officers and impeding the operation of the Secret Service.

There's good news though, no man has come within 10 feet of Mary Cheney in quite some time.

Omigaw, one of the riff-raff (that being people who don't see eye-to-eye with the administration) actually had the audacity to try say and say a discouraging word to Vice President #@&%!*#& Yourself:

Man Held for Coming Within Feet of Cheney

A 21-year-old Yale student, posing as a volunteer at the Republican National Convention, got within 10 feet of Vice President Dick Cheney and shouted anti-war statements before being dragged away, authorities said Tuesday.

Secret Service Agent Shannon Zeigler said Cheney "was never in any harm or danger" during the incident Monday night in Madison Square Garden. The suspect, Thomas Frampton, was charged with assaulting federal officers and impeding the operation of the Secret Service.

There's good news though, no man has come within 10 feet of Mary Cheney in quite some time.

Department of Children & Families Secretary Jerry Regier announced Monday that he will resign, saying he can't be effective amid continued criticism of the department.

Regier, 59, offered his resignation to Gov. Jeb Bush during an early afternoon meeting. He said he will step down sometime over the next few weeks.

Regier said at an abruptly called news conference that while the agency had made progress, he had been frustrated that so much negative attention was focused on the department, most recently created by an audit last month by Bush's inspector general that concluded that Regier and two top aides took favors from contractors.

Morton Blackwell is handing out purple heart band-aids to the yokels at the RNC:

Delegates to the Republican National Convention found a new way to take a jab at Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's Vietnam service record: by sporting adhesive bandages with small purple hearts on them.

Morton Blackwell, a prominent Virginia delegate, has been handing out the heart-covered bandages to delegates, who've worn them on their chins, cheeks, the backs of their hands and other places.

Blackwell is president of the Leadership Institute, a nonpartisan educational foundation he founded in 1979. According to its Web site, the institute prepares conservatives for success in politics, government and the news media.

So what did you do in Vietnam, Morty?

In youth politics, Mr. Blackwell was a College Republican state chairman and a Young Republican state chairman in Louisiana.

He served on the Young Republican National Committee for more than a dozen years, rising to the position of Young Republican National Federation national vice chairman at large.

Off and on for five years, 1965-1970, he worked as executive director of the College Republican National Committee under four consecutive College Republican national chairmen.

[...]

Mr. Blackwell was Barry Goldwater’s youngest elected delegate to the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco.

He was a national convention Alternate Delegate for Ronald Reagan in 1968 and 1976, and a Ronald Reagan Delegate at the 1980 national convention.

That isn't to say that Morton hasn't had some experience with militaries:

Blackwell is also President, International Policy Forum, from the 1984 CNP Directory, "a foundation which promotes educational exchanges between conservatives in the US and pro-freedom leaders in other countries." From other articles however, the IPF is painted far different. IPF trains rightwing conservatives around the world in New Right political techniques. Paul Weyrich chairs IPF.

"Blackwell and Weyrich also lead International Policy Forum (IPF), which appears to be the international parallel to CNP. The two organizations held joint meetings in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1991 and in Romania in 1992. Blackwell has also trained rightist political forces in Latin America and Africa(19) through IPF, notably supporters of the Pinochet military dictatorship, Argentinean rightists, and supporters of Inkatha chief Buthelezi in South Africa. It was Buthelezi's group that later attempted to create civil war in South Africa to keep apartheid policies in place. Inkatha worked with pro-apartheid and neo-nazi groups to stop the elections eventually won by Nelson Mandela. A number of IPF projects, including the Inkatha training, were aided by U.S. government funding through the National Endowment for Democracy.(20)" 18

The distance from College Republicans to Pinochet was probably just a walk across the street.

Joel Mowbray, whose life is so fascinating that his biography notes that he "is an avid movie buff (he owns over 200 DVDs)", went walking with the NYC protestors in an effort to point out that he has no sense of humor or irony (despite the smirk):

Some were at months out of date, others decades. Perhaps the most popular sign was one that read, “End the Occupation in Iraq.” We did. Two months ago. The second-most-popular sign was “No Draft, No Way.” There’s been no draft for three decades now, and only Democrats are proposing one.

[...]

Some protesters actually had a sense of humor. One protester carried a sign with The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy with the following text: “Worst President Ever.” (If you’re not a Simpsons Fan, trust me, it’s funny.)

Yeah. If it's only the hundreth time you heard it. What is it with conservatives and The Simpsons? Is it street cred or just the fact that they're plugging a show on Fox which gets them valuable prizes and gift certificates from Rupert Murdoch.

Back to Joel:

Some wannabe humorists unfortunately followed in Whoopi Goldberg’s footsteps. One placard read, “Another Gay Man Against Bush.” One girl’s t-shirt read, “My Bush would make a better President.”

Others simply made no sense. Several demonstrators held up signs saying, “I could sh*t a better President.” Whatever that means.

I'm sure if Joel gave it some thought (have a lie down and close your eyes...concentrate....) he could figure it out, but he was too busy making up one of those "Yeah. And then I said to him...." bon mots that so devastate liberals who aren't quick enough on their feet (possibly from not watching The Simpsons enough) for people as droll as Joel:

As their gargantuan garbage path left in their wake might indicate, this was not a grateful group of activists. When diverted from the fire (allegedly) started by one of their own, following is an exchange that occurred with one demonstrator, as recounted by a uniformed NYPD officer:

Dennis Prager, the Anal-Retentive Moralist, has just about had it with those lousy ingrates who can't appreciate all the things that Dennis the US has done for them...like invading their country and killing innocent civilians so that they can be free if, you know, they were still alive:

One great lesson of American history is that one does good in this world because it is right to do good, not because the recipients will be grateful. We Americans must therefore never judge the rightness of our actions on how much gratitude or censure we receive. So long as we remain the most blessed country on earth, it is our duty to do as much good as we can. In fact, if we don't, we will cease to be blessed.

But the ingrates still deserve the contempt of decent people.

I wonder if Prager will resent Ali Abbas for not giving him a big hug and thanking him?

At the end of World War II, General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Allied Commander of the South Pacific, said: "It is my earnest hope - indeed the hope of all mankind - that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past, a world found upon faith and understanding, a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish for freedom, tolerance and justice."

For those, like Silver, who would use 9/11 as an excuse to declare war on the world, here's a little something another General once said :

I wasn't looking for a cause. But I can't bear bullies, and I can't stand cowardly deceivers: and in the Bush Administration and the conservative media, we have the worst of both combined.

Wolcott doesn't have an axe to grind but that doesn't mean that his axe isn't sharpened. About Limbaugh he writes:

...but his king-sized addiction to painkillers reveals that beneath the ho-ho humor, he is one tightly wound ball of compulsion, holed up in a protective bubble.

Mickey Kaus is "quite a dimply little cheap-shot artist".

Coulter: "She is the Paris Hilton of postmodern politics, an enlongated zero..."

Here is a favorite passage from a section on heave-ho-ed Bush speechwriter, David Frum:

...The Right Man presents an often unflattering likeness of the commander in chief. Frum's Bush is not the genial backslapper of the campaign trail shown in Alexandra Pelosi's ditzy documentary Journeys With George but an autocratic control freak who keeps his temper in a tight jar. "Bush was a man of fierce anger. When he felt that he had been betrayed or ill-used, his face would go hard, his voice would go cold, and his words would be scathing." The Bush II White House is run with a hierarchical rigor with Bush himself as the CEO dictator. "The Bush staff rose to their feet with a snap that would have impressed a Prussian field marshall. When Bush was in a kidding mood, he would direct the staff like an orchestra conductor: He would press his hands palms down to direct them to sit and then, when they had taken their seats, raise his hands palms up to order them to rise again. Only then would they get the final palms-down." Bush has his own poodles beautifully trained.

What
a
prick.

Get the book...I know you love snark, and this is snark of the highest quality.

November 2nd, coinciding with the presidential election, APC will be releasing a collection of songs about WAR, PEACE, LOVE AND GREED, entitled "eMOTIVe." Featuring new material and songs like "imagine" by John Lennon, "What's goin on" by Marvin Gaye, "Let's have a war" by FEAR. This week we will release one of these new songs entitled, "Counting bodies like sheep to the rhythm of the war drums," with an animated video poking fun at our fearless leader. Hopefully, you'll find it as entertaining as we do.

REMEMBER... EVERY SINGLE VOTE COUNTS.

Don't let yourself be tricked into thinking it does not. It is important for us all to engage this political system and to be conscious of who is being chosen to speak for us. If you choose not to be involved with decisions that affect your life on a daily basis, in our opinion, you forfeit your right to complain about it later. THINK FOR YOURSELF. QUESTION AUTHORITY. Hopefully you will choose to vote on November 2nd.

The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation and is demanding records regarding Internet postings by critics of the Bush administration that list the names of Republican delegates and urge protesters to give them an unwelcome reception in New York City.

Federal prosecutors said in a grand jury subpoena that the information was needed as part of an investigation into possible voter intimidation.

As part of my ongoing series (that I just made up) on the RNC Convention ("Hooker handjob: $20. Praying for forgiveness after is gonna cost extra...") I've decided to adopt one of those wacky "bloggers" that I keep reading about. Apparently this "blogging" thing is all the rage these days. Kids!

Anyway I have chosen (okay, I got the short straw) young Ben Domenech of redstate.org basically because I wonder why at 22 he isn't over in Iraq fighting Islamofascism instead of working as a speechwriter which, last I checked, wasn't exactly an essential occupation necessary to a free country.

Anyway we'll being checking in on the smirky little prick as soon as he starts actually posting which I'm guessing should come later in the evening, just as soon as he finishes all the Zimas in the hotel room mini-bar.

Looks like Al French has a bit of trouble with the truth...and where he parks his penis.

There's more trouble today for Clackamas County prosecutor Al French.
He's the Vietnam veteran who called John Kerry a liar in a political commercial, then admitted that he had never witnessed Kerry in combat.

Now, The Oregonian reports that he's been put on a 30-day paid leave.

That's because he may have lied about a long-ago extramarital affair with a secretary.

French's former boss says French was asked about the alleged affair 10 years ago, but denied it.

French now claims that he didn't actually do his secretary but was relying on the accounts of three other lawyers who said they had sex with her...

"THE PARADE WE NEVER HAD" [Rich Lowry]
If you want to know how veteran supporters of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth feel, here is a comment from one Army Vietnam vet that captures it, “If John Kerry loses, it will be the parade we never had.”

Too bad that we can't ask the dead guy, who got drafted and sent to Viet Nam when George Bush jumped the TANG waiting list, about the life he never had...

ANDERSON COOPER:[...]
OK, Jenna, I have got to clear up something right from the beginning. I read an account that said you actually wanted to be a TV anchorwoman one day. Is that true?

JAMESON: That is -- that was definitely what I wanted to do. I used to practice with the TelePrompTer when I was young, because my father was a television producer. So it didn't come to pass, but you know, at least I'm still on TV.

Jenna is just a bit more honest about what she does on TV than Andrea...

Later in the interview:

COOPER: There are, you know, obviously you know there are critics. Writer Naomi Wolf recently wrote that basically the sort of the porn industry has raised expectations for men in a way that women feel, how can I compete with this? And in fact, she claims it's sort of has deadened the male libido, because you know, they feel like the real thing isn't good enough. Everyone has to be a porn star.

JAMESON: I really don't believe that. I think that it's added to people's sexual lives, and I think that it's added to women's especially, because there's a little bit of Jenna Jameson in every woman out there, and I think that now that they're starting to see me coming out more into the mainstream, they feel a little bit more comfortable being naughty in the bedroom.

The legitimacy of John Kerry's Bronze Star has been established by both the Green Beret soldier who was blown off Kerry's boat into the water and now by the gunner for PCF 43 who confirms that all units were receiving enemy fire following the mining of PCF 3. Even the Officer in Tactical Command (OTC) for that mission received a Bronze Star for aiding the stricken boat while taking enemy fire although he now wants to deny what his own citation affirms.

The legitimacy of Kerry's Silver Star was confirmed over this past weekend by Bill Rood, who was skipper of PCF 23 and present with Kerry during the events which earned him that medal. Rood has come forward because the actions of this embittered group are degrading the service and accomplishments of all of us who served on Swift Boats in Vietnam.

The group is motivated by its members' enduring anger at John Kerry's anti-war activities and by the treatment of Task Force 115 Commander, Capt. Roy Hoffman, in the book "Tour of Duty." Their memories are clouded by their emotional attachment to their anger. I can tell you that in 1969 at An Thoi, John Kerry did not have the reputation that their book claims he had.

This group asked for my signature on their "open letter" because I also commanded a Swift Boat in Vietnam in 1969 and served alongside many of them and John Kerry. I refused. I knew that what they were doing would only degrade the heroic actions of all Swift Boat veterans. You cannot challenge the process by which one person received recognition without making everyone else's medals and awards suspect as well.

Many people who served on Swifts performed many acts of heroism and courage but were never recognized for it because no one took the time necessary to submit an award recommendation for them. Over the years these men have shared vicariously in the honors given to select, fortunate individuals. Now with the relentless mudslinging from the Swift Vets for Truth, we are all sharing in the shame that they are bringing on our community. I would prefer that they spend their energy and their money promoting the positive attributes of their candidate rather than trying to settle a 35-year-old score.

War does change a person and apparently not always for the better. These men are bitter and will likely remain so until their deaths. But that will not make them right.

Summer is coming to a close for America's Worst Mother and her family and so she takes her kids (Chupacabra, Peony, Agoniste, and Melonhead) to the county fair so that they can gorge on fatty foods, collect useless trinkets, and be amongst the freaks, which is a lot like going to the Republican convention but without the hookers and the in-room porn. Let's visit with them, okay?

It is a glorious morning at the Union Fair, a mainstay of the agricultural calendar that officially spells the end of summer for people in our part of Maine. I saved my pocket money to spend on the Union Fair midway when I was a girl; now my children are doing the same.

Alas for them, the fair, like Maine itself, has in the intervening years been gentrified. Today the first stall we encounter sells jasmine rice and Thai curries. Next to it is a charming shack selling fruit smoothies and "udderly delicious" organic cream sodas. There's even a tiny mobile espresso bar. Fair-goers can still buy fudge and cotton candy and onion blossoms, but the caravans selling them have become depressingly hygienic, with none of the flies and grease puddles that used to give ordering fried dough such a frisson.

Yes, the concessionaires have been overrun by swarthy people selling non-American foods who are probably foreigners who snuck over the Canadian border when Michelle Malkin wasn't looking and now, hell, it's getting so you can't even find a good old-fashioned deep-fried Snickers bar anymore.

Later Meghan is disappointed that Rush Limbaugh isn't making public appearances anymore (probably because of the lack of the aforementioned deep-fried Snickers bars):

Somewhere along the line the freak show disappeared, taking with it a memorable mustachioed fat lady, a man who lit kerosene in his mouth, and a two-headed calf bottled in amber fluid. Gone is Stormy Winters, the hootchy-cootchy girl whose caravan illustrations depicted her as a kind of erotic snow queen with ice crystals sparkling on her Alpine breasts. Gone too is the booth where you could pay money to look at an actual, breathing, recovered drug addict. I used to make my father laugh by imitating the carney's patter: "Alive, alive, yes he is still alive..."

Losing Rush also deprived the fair of the Humoungus Draft-Defying Anal Pimple that was also such a hit with the kids before they had to settle for gay aquatic organisms like Spongebob on TV.

Later Meghan takes the kids to see some oxen doing something that is unclear but allows Meghan to get back what little seventies street cred she once had by referencing songs by Elton John and Procol Harum.

Huh Jerry! Huh Tom!" yells the ox driver, a teenaged girl in braces and rubber boots. She urges the team forward, dancing beside them, shouting and whacking. "Gee Jerry! Gee Tom!" The oxen pull. They do not seem to mind the blows, but poor Granny does. Her hide is not so tough, and with each stroke of the stick in the dirt-floored ring, one elegant gray-haired woman in the stands winces and flinches and turns a whiter shade of pale.

After watching the beating of the oxen, Meghan, angling for Scott McClellans job (America's Worst Press Secretary) tries to put a positive spin on it:

"It doesn't seem fair, hitting them," Molly says, taking up the theme as Granny disappears into the benignity of the fairgrounds. I know what she means. You watch a farmer whacking and yelling at a pair of dull-witted beasts, which stumble and pull over a short distance a weight so massive that its passage leaves a hard shiny streak along the dirt floor. And you think to yourself, poor oxen, why is this yokel whacking and yelling at them? Don't these people have tractors?

In a flash, I see how to explain it. "It may look cruel, but what you're seeing here, children, is the origin of our incredible success as a species," I say. "It was man's discovery that he could harness and domesticate creatures such as these oxen that allowed us to develop agriculture, and it is farming that over many years permitted the growth of towns and cities."

"Wow," Molly says, her eyes following the disgraced team out of the shed past a line of oxen blinking in the sunlight and waiting for their turn.

"So what you're looking at here," I continue, "is the first great technological development in humanity's progress to where we are today." I sit back, triumphant, ready to take questions. A question is quick to come.

"Why," Molly asks, gazing at the row of animals, "do oxen stick their tongues up their noses?"

But Meghan doesn't have an answer as she wistfully ponders the long supple tongue of the oxen and remembers that very special summer in the Maine of her childhood when she became...a woman.

Not since the days of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln has a president put so much stock in his Christian faith and prayer life for making decisions and leading the United States in its hour of crisis. According to BBC correspondent Justin Webb: "Nobody spends more time on his knees than George W. Bush. The Bush administration hums to the sound of prayer. Prayer meetings take place day and night. It's not uncommon to see White House functionaries hurrying down corridors carrying Bibles."

Personally when I read "Nobody spends more time on his knees than George W. Bush." followed by "hums", well, I start to connect dots to George's pretty face comments, and the mystery of why the Log Cabin Republicans don't run screaming from the big tent starts to make sense.

Did the US come into possession of a crashed UFO in the New Mexico desert? And was alien technology seeded into the American industrial complex, resulting in astonishing advances in specific technologies? And were eyewitnesses intimidated into denying it ever happened? A highly respected military intelligence officer with 30 years at the Pentagon offers explicit information that finally answers the question of what really happened at Roswell.

Crop Circles: What's the Secret Message in Crop Circles?

Some believe they are a method of communication from alien visitors, others see them as messages from the spirit world. Skeptics write them all off as a gigantic hoax, but serious investigators aren't so sure. How could matching crop circles be created in England and the United States at the same time? How could a crop circle be created in Germany that matched ancient gold, silver, and brass plates that were later discovered? With each new discovery the mystery and the controversy intensifies.

Biblical End Times: Are End Time Warnings True?

Stars falling from the sky, increased earthquake activity; disastrous flooding, famine, pestilence, and war. Are these the signs that ancient writings have warned of? Does our future hold the end of the world? Examine the evidence and decide.

Custer's Last Stand: What Really Happened at Little Big Horn?

The battle of the Little Bighorn, or Custer’s Last Stand is familiar to everyone. But, what really happened that tragic day? Was there a government conspiracy designed to get rid of George Armstrong Custer by sending him to certain death? Why was Custer’s cavalry provided with inferior weapons? Why weren’t they given accurate information about the Indian force they would confront? Why were the Indians chased off the reservation in the first place? Have the facts of what happened to Custer and his men been deliberately concealed for over a century? Why?

Jesus' Silent Years: Where Was Jesus All Those Years?

Not even the Bible can tell us what happened to Jesus between the ages of 12 and 30. Nor for that matter, is there any mention of His life when the family was forced to flee into Egypt at age 2. But now, ancient Arabic and Egyptian documents and traditions have begun to surface and scholars have developed some surprising theories about what Jesus was doing during MOST of his life. Did he discover an Oasis in Egypt, start a Church in England or carry the message to China and India? This will be an exciting journey of discovery.

I think a discussion about George Bush's faith has found its proper...milieu.

The cringe-making crux of Malkin's book is that, in light of the intelligence intercepts to which the FDR administration was privy, the relocation en masse and confinement of some 112,000 Japanese aliens and American-born citizens of Japanese ancestry between 1941 and 1945 was not a consequence of racism, but of military necessity: "Even with the benefit of hindsight, it is not at all clear that mass evacuation was unwarranted."

The argument is impoverished considering the extent of the violations against this group. It is unlikely that tens of thousands of American Japanese were involved in organized espionage or were likely to become so. But when we accept state aggression based on prior-restraint arguments, then aggress we must ad absurdum. Why not prevent all teenagers from driving? Or even better, all neoconservatives like Ms. Malkin from procreating, lest they sire proponents of state internment?

[...]

That is not all that is invalid about her modus operandi, however. Malkin has gone beyond blindly supporting her man's (Bush's) policies, to using her journalistic celebrity to spread the so-far unverified swiftboat stories. There she was on "Hardball," her face contorted like Dorian Gray on fast forward, spewing speculation that John Kerry had shot himself in Vietnam. Thankfully, host Chris Matthews rose to the occasion like a cobra, and spat a succession of sharp questions at the dissembling Malkin regarding the rumors that tumbled promiscuously from her mouth.

Gardner, 56, of Clover, S.C., has speculated it's possible the men were bought off somehow, but, whatever the case, he thinks Kerry used his powers of persuasion to bring them to a glowing, positive view diametrically opposed to the one they held in Vietnam.

He claims Wasser's reply was something like this: "I felt the same way you did, buddy, but after John sat us down and talked with us for awhile, we came around to his way of thinking."

I was going to get back to normal snarkiness today (because snark never sleeps, it's only resting its eyes...) but there were the hundreds of emails that came in that I had to read and there was the visit to the mortuary (which I will get to in a second).

I want to thank all the people who sent me their condolences which, taken as a whole, made laugh a little/cry a little/want to hug you all (but in a purely manly way if by chance you're, you know, a guy). I also want to thank all of you who didn't email me but thought about it. They're right: it's the thought that counts.

Now about the mortuary stuff...

In accordance with my dad's wishes we set about making the arrangements for his cremation, so it was off to the mortuary this afternoon with my mom and my brother (my sister and her husband having left this morning to fly to Tavarua for ten days of surfing. We told her to go, Dad would have wanted her to. Actually he would have wanted to go too.) Anyway we were met at the mortuary by a very nice man that I'll call 'Dave' because his name was...Dave. Accompanying 'Dave' was 'Brian' (that may or may not be his real name) who explained that today was 'Dave's' first day and he would be supervising. I mentioned that I thought it was pretty neat that 'Dave' didn't have to wear a paper hat that said "Trainee". 'Dave' didn't know whether to laugh or not probably because comments like that weren't covered in mortuary school, but he did manage to maintain the proper mortuary-guy front and rolled with it.

There was:

Lots of paperwork.
Lots and lots of paperwork.
Lots and lots and lots of paperwork.

Towards the end 'Dave' asked if any of us would like to be present when my father's "container" was entered (fed?...I forget what term 'Dave' used) into the flames at the crematorium. If there was ever any doubt that she's my real mom, it ended when she replied, "I don't think so...I mean I could see it if you really hated the person."

I think we're all going to be okay.

***

Hopefully this will be my last post on this subject. But I want to conclude with a quote that was sent to me by a reader (my apologies for forgetting which one of you sent it...you can all fight over the credit. No biting.) back when my dad first had his stroke.

Harold Brodkey described his last days and his impending death from AIDS in a slim but powerful book: This Wild Darkness. At the end he concluded:

One may be tired of the world--tired of the prayer-makers, the poem-makers, whose rituals are distracting and human and pleasant but worse than irritating because they have no reality--while reality itself remains very dear. One wants a glimpse of the real. God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely real, without miracle--or instruction. I am standing on an unmoored raft, a punt moving on the flexing, flowing face of the river. It is precarious. The unknowing, the taut balance, the jolts and instability spread in widening ripples through all my thoughts. Peace? There never was any in the world. But in the pliable water, under the sky, unmoored, I am traveling now and hearing myself laugh, at first with nerves and then with genuine amazement. It is all around me.

Two baby boys are born in the same hospital on the same day and are placed in bassinets next to each other. The next day each one is taken home by it's respective parents and they never meet growing up.

Seventy-some years later they both come back to that same hospital on the same day to die. They are placed in a room together and after everyone has left and it has grown quiet, one of them leans over to the other and asks, "So. What did you think?"

***

For the most part, we don't get to do an 'exit interview' when we die. We are either clouded by age, or in a place of pain where we can't speak, much less reason. Sometimes it's abrupt like a car crash and sometimes we just slip away while no one is looking...and then it's just done. Over. Book closed. And so it is that we take our personal story, our review of our life, at least the way we would tell it, with us. Every other person who knows the dearly departed has their own version to tell but, as you know, most people are, at best, unreliable narrators.

All of this is my way of saying that my father passed away this morning.

For those who have been reading this blog for over a year, you may remember that he had a massive stroke on August 22 of last year. What at first seemed minor turned out to be what they called "an evolving stroke" that continued on through the night after they thought it was over. The resulting damage left him paralyzed on his left side and able to speak only occasionally. In the past year he never ever showed any improvement although we sometimes tried to convince ourselves that he was improving. Two weeks ago he slipped into a deep sleep and, well, this morning he left without saying goodbye.

But that's not the story of his life.

He was born to Italian immigrants in Columbus, Ohio, the sixth boy of seven children. His mother passed away a few months after his birth but not before she and her husband named him Emilio. All of his friends came to call him Boggi (as in Bogey), which is a contraction of our last name. In later years many people were surprised to hear that wasn't his real name.

On his first day at school he was sent home because he didn't speak english. He ended up having to repeat that year. He dropped out of school early, but went back and got his high school diploma when he was 32. I was seven years old when I saw him graduate.

He joined the Navy when he was seventeen and ended up stationed in China at the end of WWII. If you asked him what he did in the Navy he would tell you that he served as an MP whose job it was to keep the other sailors out of the Chinese whorehouses. Not exactly a Greatest Generation story, but he seemed to like telling it.

He and his brothers opened up a dry cleaner in San Diego in 1949. Later he would go on to work in management at General Dynamics where he was very proud of the work they did for the space program. He felt a great sense of ownership and personal pride when we landed on the moon.

He was married for 53 years to a beautiful Italian woman named Jean and they had three children, all of whom turned out pretty darn well if I do say so myself. According to my mother, he always told people his greatest accomplishment was his kids and the kind of people they had become.

He helped us with math and taught us how to tie a hook and how to play cribbage and that we should never lie. He also told us we didn't ever have to call anyone 'sir' or 'mam' unless they earned it first.

He had many opinions, some of which I agreed with.

He used to grow so much zucchini and tomatoes in the summer that people in the neighborhood would hide behind their doors when they saw him coming.

He liked jokes, ice cream, Coke (regular, never diet), crossword puzzles, dogs, Frank Sinatra songs, and watching his granddaughter play Little League which he thought was the damndest thing.

He enjoyed his retirement but I think he was driving my mother nuts. Most days her only salvation was sending him to Home Depot or over to a neighbors house to fix something.

He didn't want it to end this way. He didn't want to be one of those people who became ill and wasted away in a hospital bed, but he stuck around for a year doing just that, which allowed us to start learning how we were going to live without him. I hope we learned well.

We didn't get the chance to say goodbye to him. We didn't get our chance to do our exit interview with him. But I like to think that if I had had the chance to lean over and ask him, "So. What did you think?", he probably would have leaned back and said, "I think it went pretty well, don't you?"

Hitch:
This was a combat of more than 30 years ago, fought with a largely drafted army using indiscriminate tactics and weaponry against a deep-rooted and long-running domestic insurgency. (Agent Orange, for example, was employed to destroy the vegetation in the Mekong Delta and make life easier for the Swift boats.) The experience of having fought in such a war is absolutely useless to any American today and has no bearing on any thinkable fight in which the United States could now become engaged. (My emphasis)

Yes, and waking up in a pool of your own vomit every morning is no reason why you shouldn't have another drink tonight...

WHO DOES THE "FEAR AND SMEAR"? [Tim Graham]
In a look at how allergic the liberal media are to John Kerry's 1971 Senate testimony, at least the infamous we-shot-civilians-and-cows-and-dogs-for-fun war-crimes passage, Brent Bozell relays our time on the Nexis playground today:

Oh, hell. Why even bother with anything that Bozell has to say since he has been saying the same damn thing for years and nobody cares and, come on, face it, if he weren't William F. Buckley's brother-in-law he'd be a night manager trainee at Radio Shack.

So, instead, lets look at how allergic Tim Graham is about reporting on his boss's other comments.

New York -- TIME magazine announced today that its reporter, Matthew Cooper, has given a deposition to Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald in connection with the leak investigation involving Valerie Plame.

[...]

Waived confidentiality, eh? Interesting. I don't pretend to understand what's going on here, but I have a feeling we're moving toward some sort of a conclusion.

Putting aside the controversy over Bush's Air National Guard service (or dereliction of duty), there was another instance when Bush clearly did not speak truthfully about his military record. In 1978, Bush, while running for Congress in West Texas, produced campaign literature that claimed he had served in the US Air Force. According to a 1999 Associated Press report, Bush's congressional campaign ran a pullout ad in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal that declared he had served "in the US Air Force and the Texas Air National Guard where he piloted the F-102 aircraft."

Bush lost that congressional race, but twenty-one years later, the AP questioned him about the ad. The news outlet had a good reason to do so. Bush had never served in the Air Force. He had only been in the Air National Guard. But when AP asked Bush if he had been justified in claiming service in the Air Force, Bush, then the governor of Texas and a presidential candidate, said, "I think so, yes. I was in the Air Force for over 600 days." Karen Hughes, his spokeswoman, maintained that when Bush attended flight school for the Air National Guard from 1968 to 1969 he was considered to be on active duty for the Air Force and that several times afterward he had been placed on alert, which also qualified as active duty for the Air Force. All told, she said, Bush had logged 607 days of training and alerts. "As an officer [in the Air National Guard]," she told the AP, "he was serving on active duty in the Air Force."

But this explanation was wrong. Says who? The Air Force.

Well it's not as if he had been wrong about which month he had been in Cambodia...

Now, that would be deserving of hundreds of posts and reader emails and second-tier pundit columns and mentions on Faux news and chickenhawk blogs....

With a little paint Tuscaloosa could be just as nice as Kabul...if you squint a little.

They're getting all excited because members of the Alabama National Guard are willing to re-up:

The largest Alabama Guard unit to return from Iraq, the 877th Engineer Battalion, had its first weekend drills earlier this month at its northwest Alabama armories. And at those drill sessions, only 19 of the 555 soldiers who attended said they wanted to hang up their helmets or were seriously considering it.

...recent news, from slowing economic growth to wilting job creation, has changed the landscape. With the Republican convention a week away, allies and opponents are clamoring for more specifics.

"You either define yourself on these big issues or the Democrats will define you," said Richard K. Armey, the former House Republican leader who co-chairs the new conservative advocacy group, FreedomWorks. "John Kerry will do just fine with what he thinks your secret plan is if you don't tell us what it is."

Normally I would get a little excited about a hardline Republican turning on Slow Learner Man, but then it is Dick Armey, of whom Paul Begala once said, "Well, like they say in Texas, if goofy ideas ever get to $40 a barrel, I want the drilling rights to Dick Armey's head."

So we move along and find that the Washington Post has discovered that, when the barrel is empty and and scraped clean, lift it up and look in loamy muck beneath which is the natural habitat of Donald "Will Stalk for Attention" Luskin:

"I guess the most accurate thing I could say is there's sort of a deafening silence," said Donald Luskin, a conservative investment adviser in California. Referring to the current economic team, Luskin said, "The period these people have been in power is a period when very little economic initiative has been coming out of the White House."

I guess the WaPo couldn't find any real economists willing to talk to them....

The Amazon thing is a bunch of bullshit, as well. It's been well documented that these conservative nutbag books get to be number one because conservative organizations run by people who want to keep all of their money instead of, I don't know, helping their fellow man, buy the book by the thousands. Then they end up in some remainder bin or as giveaways at crazypeople conventions. So please, stop with the being impressed.

First Athens isn't too keen on his showing up uninvited at the Olympics.

The Iraqi soccer team, having seen at Abu Ghraib what Americans do to naked Iraqis, doesn't want the fratboy towel-snapper in their lockerroom.

Now George Bush's bestest ally-buddy is turning off the lights and pretending that he's not at home:

BRITISH Prime Minister Tony Blair is refusing to fly to the US to receive a medal bestowed on him by the nation for his support over last year's Iraq war, a London newspaper reported today.

US President George W. Bush has put huge pressure on his closest ally to pick up the Congressional Medal of Honour in person, the Sunday Mirror said, quoting a senior British government source.

Mr Blair is immensely popular with large sections of the American public for his staunch support of the Iraq war and the White House believes a visit by the prime minister now would provide a much-needed boost to Mr Bush's re-election campaign, the weekly said.

"There has been a lot of telephone traffic between the White House and Downing Street over the medal in recent week," the Sunday Mirror quoted a senior government source as saying.

"George Bush wants the prime minister to come to Washington and pick up the medal, which is the highest honour America can bestow on a foreigner.

"But he has refused for more than a year now and for good reason. He cannot possibly accept an award for the Iraq war when British and American troops continue to risk their lives there."

So I guess that "Mission Accomplished" t-shirt and tote bag is going to go to waste too....

Three American soldiers who participated in the March 1968 attack on a Vietnam village called Pinkville said in interviews made public today that their Army combat unit perpetrated, in the words of one, "point-blank murder" on the residents.

"The whole thing was so deliberate. It was point-blank murder and I was standing there watching it," said Michael Bernhardt, Franklin Square, N.Y., now completing his Army tour at Fort Dix, N.J.

Bernhardt was a member of one of three platoons of an Eleventh Infantry Brigade company under the command of Capt. Ernest Medina. The company entered the Viet Cong-dominated area on March 16, 1968, when on a search-and-destroy mission. Pinkville, known to Vietnamese as Song My village, is about six miles northeast of Quang Ngai.

{...}

Bernhardt, interviewed at Fort Dix, said he had beem delayed on the operation, and fell slightly behind the company, then led by Calley's platoon, as it entered the village.

[...]

"I walked up and saw there guys doing strange things. Ther were doing it three ways. One: They were setting fires to the hootches and huts and waiting for people to come out and then shooting them up. Two: They were going into the hootches and shooting them up. Three: They were gathering people in groups and shooting them.

"As I walked in, you could see the piles of people all through the village...all over. They were gathered up into large groups.

"I saw them shoot an M-79 (grenade launcher) into a group of people who were still alive. But it (the shooting) was mostly done with a machine gun. They were shooting women and children just like anybody else.

"We met no resistance and I only saw three captured weapons. We had no casualties. It was just like any other Vietnamese village--old Papa-san, women, and kids. As a matter of fact, I don't remember seeing one military-age male in the entire place, dead or alive. The only prisoner I saw was about 50."

An Army communique reporting on the operation said that Medina's company recovered two M-1 rifles, a carbine, a short-wave radio and enemy documents in the assault. The Viet Cong body count was listed at 128 and there was no mention of civilian casualties.

[...]

Another witness to the shootings was Michael Terry, Orem Utah, then a member of the C Platoon of Medina's company and now a sophomore at nearby Brigham Young University. Interviewed at his home, Terry said he, too, came on the scene moments after the killings began.

"They just marched through shooting everybody," he said. "Seems like no one said anything...They just started pulling people out and shooting them."

At one point, he said, more than 20 villagers were lined up in front of a ditch and shot.

"They had them in a group standing over a ditch--just like a Nazi-type thing...One officer ordered a kid to machine-gun everyone down, but the kid just couldn't do it. He threw the machine gun down and the officer picked it up..." Terry rememberd.

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?....We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country - the question of racism which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions such as the use of weapons; the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything.

An American Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation of Alcatraz put it to me very succinctly. He told me how as a boy on an Indian reservation he had watched television and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the Indians, and then suddenly one day he stopped in Vietnam and he said, "my God, I am doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people," and he stopped. And that is what we are trying to say, that we think this thing has to end.

We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick, and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country....

We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission - to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so when thirty years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

That’s apparently what she said, while appearing on Rush Limbaugh’s Entertainment Radio Program today. She certainly wrote it on her blog. To be precise: “his (Chris Matthews’) scurrilous charges were repeated by his MSNBC colleague Keith Olbermann, who called me an ‘idiot.’”

Well, I felt terrible. In my little naïve old-fashioned way, I feel you preserve terms like that exclusively for men. I was preparing a formal apology. Political differences, fault or innocence, are all secondary. There are codes.

Funniest darn thing happened, though. Checked the tape of the show, re-read the blog. I never called Michelle Malkin an “idiot.”

Never used the word.

Second time I referenced her, I did say “this woman, Malkin, who made a fool of herself on this network, about an hour ago…”

So that’s what you’re dealing with here. She’s an author or a journalist or something, and she misquoted the insult to herself.

The profanity-laced and racist-filled hate mail has been most amusing. Many are taking their cue from Keith Olbermann and suggesting that I go kill myself.

Did Olbermann actually suggest Michelle kill herself? Well you would think that if you were, well, an idiot like Michelle (hey...she said it, not me). Here is the nearest that I can find:

Final note here: Ms. Malkin complains online that I wrote I was never prouder of Matthews, which reminds me of something from my sportscasting days.

15 years ago, when I was still a comparative newcomer in television, I made a gigantic rookie’s mistake. Bill Stout, the legendary Los Angeles newsman who haunted the hallways as a figure of indomitable moral force, looked at me later that day and said, “I’m proud of you. You have courage. If I had just done that on television, I would go home, and open my veins.”

So, Michelle Malkin, I’m proud of you, too.

Ooooooo. You only have to read between the lines to see that Malkin is remarkably... thin-skinned.

So it's back to Fox with her where she can publicly lick her wounds, or maybe even get Alan Colmes to lick them for her.

"President Bush stopped for about 20 minutes at the Cady Cheese Factory and Shoppe ... near Wilson, Wisconsin. He toured the factory briefly, urging his host, Dale Marcott, to tell him what they do. Their conversation was hard to hear, but essentially Marcott told the president they make cheese."

Well it was a meeting of the minds (loosely speaking) on Rush today when the drug-addled, tripled divorced, didn't-go-to-Vietnam-because-of-a-pimple-on-his-fat-ass Rush Limbaugh had Michelle "If I wanted to be publicly humiliated I would have signed on for a bukkake video instead of going on Hardball" Malkin on:

First, a horny and lonely Rush tries buttering her up by lying:

We'd like to welcome to the program Michelle Malkin, the well known, famous and powerful and influential writer and author.

Yes. She also quite blond, omnipotent, and immortal.

Then Michelle is pissed she didn't get to plug her book "In Praise of Racism":

MALKIN: Well, they said that they wanted me to come and talk about two topics: the swift boat veterans and my book and the reason why I was there in the first place is that I, you know, was able to go on a competing network -- I am a Fox News contributor -- during my book tour. So they knew that I was there to talk about the book, and in fact Matthews had chitchatted with me a little bit before the second segment began about Japanese-Americans.

RUSH: Now, did you get thrown off the show --

MALKIN: Yes.

RUSH: -- before your segment ended or before it was scheduled to end?

MALKIN: Yes. They had told me from the start and then right as -- before I sat down that it would be for two segments and that the second segment would talk about my book and I was summarily dismissed at the end of that first segment.

RUSH: How did he do that? What did he say to you?

MALKIN: He just said, "You're off," and so somebody escorted me off, and this is interesting, because I mention it on my blog. As soon as I left the room he dispatched one of his staffers to go and try to find the book Unfit for Command, and of course they went to an office where I had left my copy and snatched my copy up -- copy of it and were desperately flipping through it to see if what he said was true.

RUSH: Now we're jumping the gun a little bit. But the first thing that strikes me about this is they don't have at MSNBC their own copy of this book.

MALKIN: Yes.

RUSH: They had to go get your copy.

MALKIN: Yes. They didn't ask you for it? They just took it?

MALKIN: They just took it. It was quite flabbergasting but I guess this is how they operate.

Yeah. They invite guests on to steal their books...and they also go through their purses in the Green Room looking for cigarettes, condoms, and Mentos.

Rush becomes aroused:

MALKIN: Right. Bingo. I had specifically referred to "self-inflicted wounds" and I was trying to give him the context and it to talk about the incidents that are described in the book very explicitly about how those shrapnel wounds were apparently sustained by Kerry. He wouldn't let me finish. He kept trying to stuff his warped interpretation down my throat and I tried as hard as possible not to let him do that and --

"stuff his warped interpretation down my throat "

Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

Michelle demonstrates her devasting and cutting wit:

MALKIN: They really got to change the name of the show to "Slimeball" or "Spitball" because that's what they threw at me.

MALKIN: No, nobody does, but apparently he was just so carried away and --

RUSH: It was because your appearance on Matthews' show earlier he called you...?

MALKIN: Yeah.

RUSH: So you had a carry-over effect.

MALKIN: I guess so. (Laughing.)

RUSH: Michelle, you should be proud. Careers are made over this thing.

Yes. We prize our idiots. Sometimes we even let them be President.

Back to Rush:

RUSH: Say, Michelle, are you aware of a statement that Matthews posted on the MSNBC website last night about your appearance?

MALKIN: On his blog, yes. He basically cast himself as the truth teller and repeated his claims of wanting to keep irresponsible comments off of his show.

RUSH: Here's what I have here. He said, "One of my jobs on Hardball is to cut to the truth, cut through to the truth of the tonight on Hardball one of our guests pushed the idea that John Kerry had won his Purple Heart by deliberately shooting himself." (Laughing.) Nobody's ever said that, nor did you! (Laughing.) You weren't given a chance to explain it. "The charge is without merit and baseless as our guest under close questioning herself admitted. We'll keep covering these issues..." (Crumbling up paper.) You know what's happening? These people are cracking up, Michelle. They cannot deal with the truth. They don't want to defend the charges because they can't, so they have to discredit those who carry those charges forward, and you were in that position last night.

MALKIN: Indeed, they are really in full desperation mode, and it really was a wake-up call to me to see firsthand how absolutely batty they have been driven by alternative media sources, including you and talk radio, the blogsphere, Fox News. They can't --

RUSH: Yeah, their monopoly is gone --

MALKIN: Yeah.

RUSH: -- and they're never going to get it back and they don't know how to operate when they don't have a monopoly.

MALKIN: They can't deal with it.

Yeah. So they ran off to Washington Journal, and Unfiltered and Rush Limbaugh's show to whine about it. And they also immediately wrote a Dear Diary about their horrible experience and listed Malkin's phone number so they could call her up later and murmur vague obscenities.

Not surprisingly, the new ad from the Swift Boat Veterans gets to the heart of the controversy and takes us back to the days of Vietnam in ways that I never dreamed would happen in 2004. These veterans are furious with Kerry for implying, essentially, that they were all William Calleys. I am really conflicted about the war itself, but I certainly don't blame the veterans for feeling this way. Some of them evidently had declined to say the very things Kerry did, although they were tortured by the North Vietnamese to do so. Kerry's words in the ad are extremely harsh. Now I wonder... even more than I previously did... why the Senator chose to base his campaign on his Vietnam service. Why would he want to do that, other than the obvious innoculation against Bush's anti-terror record? (There are other ways to handle that.) It seems particularly odd for a man who once compared American servicemen to Genghis Khan to call attention to this. The only explanation I can offer is he is wrestling with private demons and has secret wishes only his analyst could know.

Not shown on the ad is Kerry's preface to those comments, in which he said he is reporting what others said at a conference of Vietnam veterans in Detroit. Instead, a member of the Swift Boat group refers to the statements as "the accusations that John Kerry made against the veterans who served in Vietnam."

A Swift Boat member says, referring to captives in Vietnam, "That was part of the torture, was to sign a statement that you had committed war crimes" and says Kerry "betrayed us" by his comments upon his return.

Another says Kerry "gave the enemy for free what I, and many of my comrades in North Vietnam, in the prison camps, took torture to avoid saying. It demoralized us."

An official transcript of Kerry's testimony shows he was referring to the meeting in Detroit, part of what was called the Winter Soldier investigation. He told the Senate committee that at that meeting "many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia" and relived the "absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do."

"They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."

It never ceases to amaze me how low a person will go to beg a link from the professor or James Taranto. I'm sure Simon will again recall for us how he protested the war and for civil rights and yadda yadda yadda when he was a younger man. And maybe he even thinks he had some personal part in ending the war. But just like it took Nixon to go to China, maybe it took a decorated war hero to speak before Congress on all that was wrong in Viet Nam to nudge them away from support of the great folly that it was. And maybe the two POW's should consider the fact that it was people like Kerry who helped bring about a quicker end to the war and that maybe, just maybe, he may have saved their lives.

I always thought that Roger Simon was better than this. Then again, maybe he has some personal demons and secret wishes dating back to the sixties he should take up with his analyst. He could start with his unsatisfied emotional needs requiring attention from others.

A struggling writer battling inner demons...trapped by weather at a remote house in Maine...children with vivid imaginations...a boring and steadfast spouse.

Where have I read this before?

Yes. It's REDRUM time for America's Worst Mother as Meghan, Mr. Meghan, and the kids (JeJune, Zoloft, Mimsy, and Cleopatra Jones) are joined by cousins Ipecac and Fungo during their vacation idyll...or should I say: homicidyll? (Cue creepy music and sterile/bleached-out Stanley Kubrick cinematography...)

Opening scene:

It is a drizzly August morning in Maine, and with two extra children tucked into our small cottage, bringing the number of ankle-biters to six, it is what you might, wearing rose-colored glasses, call a cozy scene. Logs are crackling in the fireplace, children are perched on half-a-dozen surfaces,

(Cut to iron fireplace poker with it's sharpened hook)

and the floor is strewn with the early-morning detritus of a major Lego game.

(Cut to Lego Transamerica building and simple lego laying on the floor...and you know how much those hurt when you step on them)

As it happens, I am wearing rose-colored glasses. There is nothing so nice as being liberated from the to-do list of ordinary life, even if one is confined to quarters while it rains.

(Cut to first person view through rose-colored glasses making the room look....bloody)

"Two points," says my husband, clicking down a domino. "Your turn."

(Cut to two people who haven't had sex in weeks)

Outside, Lake St. George is caped in thick mist. This month we've had nothing like the ferocious storms people have endured farther down the Atlantic coast, but each Charley and Bonnie and Danielle has nonetheless brought rain in its wake and the cottage has been socked in for days. The lawn is a mushroom factory.

(Cut to shot in kitchen of simmering pot on stove, full of beef bourguignon...and poisonous mushrooms)

When the sky does clear, and we all pile out, the mosquitoes immediately launch strafing runs down the picnic table. Yet miraculously not once has anyonecomplained or asked, "Now what can we do?" For with the rain have come waves of cousins and aunts and uncles, and almost every meal has been of the jolly loaves-and-fishes variety.

(Cut to shot of relatives stopping down the road, so hungry they'd even eat at Arbys)

Phoebe tucks in beside me, her soft fingers stroking my skin. "I love your arms," she says. Once she told a grandmother, "I love your face," with similar tender caresses and that person promptly melted on the floor, like the tiger running around the tree in the old story.

(Flashback to "acid bath in the face" scene followed by cemetery scene, and the reading of the will)

It's my turn again, meanwhile, and I think I can just about pull off a —

"Three points! I'm out, you're toast," I cry, in an excess of bad sportsmanship, jumping up to do a victory dance. "I did it, I did it, oh yeah, yeah, yeah."

(Foreshadowing of burning bed scene...pg 149)

The boys are back. "We ran out of gas, but I brought a rocket skateboard and you brought rocket shoes and we're almost in the Himalayas," Paris tells his cousin.

(Faulty gas tank...large Michael Bay-like explosion)

The screen door slams

(Decapitation)

That's not what I mean." There is a pause, broken only by the quiet snapping of the fire.

(Immolation)

I laugh a little scornfully. "But you did it for yourself!"

(Suicide)

At that moment, panic suddenly strikes the top of Mt. Everest, and the boys begin roaring and spitting into their transmitters or cell-phones or whatever they are. Paris only has time to gasp, "And then we started falling!" before the two of them cry, "Aaaagh!" and fall, like mountaineers dying in slow motion, off the sofa.

(...and onto the Lego Transamerica building forshadowed in scene four)

"By the way," says my husband, coming out of the kitchen with a fresh cup of coffee, "it's supposed to rain again tomorrow."

I haven't yet been able to delve into the Swift Boat stuff in great detail, but here is one thought. These guys have to worry about getting discredited like the Arkansas state troopers. Remember, the troopers were basically right. And the Clinton team still managed to beat them, based on a little wobble and a few character attacks. The Clinton effort was aided, of course, by a media hostile to the troopers.

Besides Ferguson, Ronnie Anderson, another of the four troopers who originally spoke to the Los Angeles Times and American Spectator, now admits that he corroborated the stories to reporters, even though he had no first-hand knowledge that they were true.

In a sworn affidavit prepared for the Jones case, Anderson said: "From what I heard the other troopers say and from I ... read in the American Spectator, the stories that were provided were nothing more than old fish tales, with little if any basis in fact."

While Bush's rival, Democrat John Kerry, continues to campaign, the president is scheduled to be at his ranch for about a week, taking a break from re-election appearances. It's his 38th presidential trip to his ranch where he spends time outdoors fishing, clearing brush and exploring its rocky terrain, waterfalls and canyons. On Thursday, he took a bike ride, and has been watching some of the Summer Olympics, McClellan said.

Oh. Show of hands. How many think that George W Bush is actually "working on his acceptance speech" as in writing it? Let's face it, he's going to spend the week learning to pronounce anything that clocks in over two syllables.

McClellan:

"While, of course, he'll talk about the clear differences that voters face, it'll very much be a forward-looking speech talking about his agenda for America that builds upon his record of results."

Results?

The best thing he can say is that not everyone in America died on 9/11. After that it just be an awkward silence as he stares at the teleprompter until the crickets start to chirp...

Records show that the group received the bulk of its initial financing from two men with ties to the president and his family - one a longtime political associate of Mr. Rove's, the other a trustee of the foundation for Mr. Bush's father's presidential library. A Texas publicist who once helped prepare Mr. Bush's father for his debate when he was running for vice president provided them with strategic advice. And the group's television commercial was produced by the same team that made the devastating ad mocking Michael S. Dukakis in an oversized tank helmet when he and Mr. Bush's father faced off in the 1988 presidential election.

Now I'm not exactly what you might call a techno-geeko-babbler (no! you say. Yes, it's true )and if you asked me what RSS meant, I would guess it was a Hooked on Phonics way of spelling arse. So why would I go to Blogger-Con? I like the Bay Area, my wife and I have friends who live there, and we could really use a trip together sans daughter and dogs. That's reason enough for me. Plus I could meet some bloggers whose work I really admire. And I could always marry a guy while I'm there since I hear that's what people do in San Francisco these days instead of going to Fishermans Wharf...

Of course I'm on the wait list so we'll see how that goes, and then I'll have to reveal my Super Secret Identity, but that's a small price to pay to hang out with people who might get in a slapfight over TypePad.